


ma melava halani

by liluye (mouselini)



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Character Study, Multi, drabs, sorry Merrill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 12:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8668378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouselini/pseuds/liluye
Summary: Despite their occasional and somewhat insulting language barrier, Merrill has always had a thing for Garrett Hawke.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't turn out how I wanted it to but I stopped caring about it halfway through and I don't write much anymore, so.
> 
> Elvish borrowed from FenxShiral’s Project Elvhen series. I can’t recommend this resource enough; we as a fandom owe this person a kidney.

Despite their occasional and somewhat insulting language barrier, Merrill has always had a thing for Garrett Hawke.

It started as appreciation. A peculiar fixation on the way his eyes pinch up like moons when he’s angry, little lights in a very dark room, rattling and threatening but soft, still, when they drop down to make sure everyone else is safe. It isn’t something he does on purpose. Most things he does aren’t. He just _doe_ stuff, and Merrill could never help but _thank_ him for it, all of it, until one night her _thank you for helping_ s became _thank you for caring_ s and she’d lain awake gnawing holes through her sleeve, wondering how that could’ve happened.

Merrill thinks about Hawke very much. She thinks about the corner of his mouth and how it quirks when he asks about her morning. She thinks about his distaste for spiders and elderflower cordials, the dirt that collects beneath his fingernails, how often he laughs and how-- _despite_ their occasional and somewhat insulting language barrier--often he makes her laugh, too.

Sometimes Merrill even thinks that maybe, a long time ago, Mythal might’ve made a deal with her in a dream, and that-- _that’s_ how Garrett Hawke had come to be.

 

She arrives at his home before he does one night, accepts Sandal’s wordless offer of water and waits by Hawke’s desk with her knees shaking and her face wet.

“Fenris is gone,” she tells him when he enters; bandaged to the neck, Hawke responds by dragging his knuckles beneath his nose. “He ran past my house and now he’s gone.”

Blood splashes off his hands and hits the floor with a _thump_. “Yeah?” he asks. It comes out strong, like him, but Merrill thinks it sounds too far away.

“Yeah,” she repeats, and remembers how, not an hour before, Fenris bolted sword-first through the Alienage so fast she almost didn’t see, bright as lightning and loud as thunder, how the crack in his voice sort of sounded like a sob. Remembers how Isabela screamed after him, just as loud but terrified to the bone -- not angry like Fenris, not wild or desperate -- until there was nothing left but curious eyes and clouds and night and quiet.

Merrill blinks, knits her eyebrows. “It was very frightening.”

But Hawke doesn’t look like he recognizes her now, and instead of speaking he just hands his staff to the elvhen girl behind him.

There’s jealousy in Merrill’s heart when the girl scurries upstairs, timid but determined to learn the layout of his estate. “Who,” Merrill starts. The word hangs in the air, awkward, asking whether she really wants to know.

“Orana. Want some’th stronger than that?”

She watches Hawke’s fingers tap the rim of her glass, and they’re so gentle that she forgets for a second how often they summon storms.

“Yes,” she swallows.

“Good. We got some Sourvun in the kitchen.” He nudges her jaw, wresting a smile from the edge of her mouth, leaving a tingling mark. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

Hawke’s never been able to pronounce the words of her kin no matter how hard he tries, and Merrill thinks about that too, all the time, right as the sun sets and after it breaks again. Every day.

“‘Ma serannas, Hawke,” she says, biting her nails, and later walks home with her arms clutched tightly to her chest.

\--

“I’m still not sure how you did this,” Hawke laughs. “Wanna explain again?”

Giggling, Merrill uncrosses her legs and shifts to a kneel. “Well, I was following you,” she sighs, wincing as her foot cramps against her hardwood floor.

“Of course.”

“Of course. And then something _happened_.”

“Oh, naturally.”

Merrill snorts again and gives Hawke the strip of nug leather when he points toward it with his chin. “Naturally,” she repeats. “And we were swept into battle with a great, big bear on the way home from Sundermo--”

When Hawke pauses his craft to encouragingly interrupt with, “ _Merrill_ ,” she nods, wiping away the tears that suddenly spring to her eyes.

“Sorry--”

“No sorry.”

“Sor--um, a-and then my grip broke in two.”

“And then your grip broke in two.” Shaking his head in interest, Hawke bites off a dangling piece of twine. “I still don’t get it, Merrill,” he muses, spitting thread.

She doesn’t know whether she’s laughing or crying when she says, “it was a very strong bear,” but she must be happy because Hawke’s sitting knee-to-knee with her on the floor of her very dusty home, fixing her mistakes.

“Elgar’nan, I’m _so sorry_ for this, Hawke.”

Holding her staff to the side, straight-out and level with his shoulders like a fishing pole, Hawke closes one eye to gauge its steadiness. “Stop that,” he dismisses, clearly pleased with his work. “Here. Merrill. Merrill? Look at me.”

It takes her a minute, but she does.

“You’re gonna be alright. Right?” Hawke tells her. He bites his bottom lip and reaches out to playfully scratch at her shoulder. “You’ve got a staff that’s all fixed up and a brand new thing for your mirror, right?”

“Right,” she says, distant, focused on his mouth for centuries before she’s able to find her tongue again. Quietly, she says, “Arulin’Holm,” and swallows when his gaze immediately brightens, suns on reddening leaves.

“Wassat?”

“The thing. It is called an Arulin’Holm.”

“Arulin’Holm.”

Del, Merrill thinks, and she draws her legs up to rest her chin upon her kneecaps. “Eh- _roo_ -l’n-ohm,” she clarifies. Hawke. There are moths in her stomach when he grins like that; she imagines catching them one by one, putting them all in a jar.

“Eyroolinoom.”

“Eh- _roo_ -l’n-ohm.”

Hawke has very beautiful teeth.

“Ey- _rool_ -inum.” 

“Eh- _roo_ -l’n-ohm.”

“Ey- _roo_ -lin-um,” he tries again, leaning forward, fingers curled around his own exposed ankles because his boots are by the door and coated in a layer of mud that he hadn’t wanted to track through the house.

Still wrong. “That’s good enough, Hawke,” Merrill mumbles softly, finally accepting her mended staff. “How did you learn to do these things?”

Hawke shrugs a little as he says, “I’unno, my dad made stuff,” but he doesn’t explain further and Merrill never asks again, just like she doesn’t ask about Fenris, who’s been gone for five days, who’d left nothing but Isabela’s helpless gasp as he’d fled from the starlight of the empty docks.

“Ey- _roo_ -linoom.”

Merrill explodes into laughter, and Hawke just looks at her through his starry eyes like a dog who finally learned to sit.

“Can I buy you a drink?” He asks.

“Ma serannas,” she says, more relieved than she’s ever been, and she means it very much.

 

\--

 

Hawke has his subtleties. Each one of them tells a story, Merrill thinks, and not a single one is borrowed from something else.

Three times a week he’ll knock at her door with intent to walk her to the Hanged Man, where their group gathers for rounds of ale and games of poker that the both of them always end up losing. 

One night, Hawke falls silent.

“Broody!” Varric shouts grandly, reaching behind him for a stool to drag to the table. “And here we thought you’d finally joined the Maker, amen.”

Fenris hums, and Merrill sees exhaustion in his pout, the ash in his once-green eyes and the way they never once scatter to Hawke.

“Not yet,” Fenris answers, still standing. There’s a red band on his gauntlet that reminds Merrill of the blood she spreads when the Eluvian begs her to stay. “But if your sobriety is any indication, He should be expecting us both sometime tonight.”

Merrill doesn’t hear Varric’s offer to buy more ale. Instead, she quietly follows Hawke outside and marvels at how pale someone’s smile can be.

 

\--

The first time he kisses her is the only time he kisses her. It manifests in his house as a brandy-induced afterthought to calling her adorable, lasts for two minutes and ends with both hands tucked against her waist and his forehead dipping down and him slurring, “maybe you should go, I’m really lit up right now.”

Merrill doesn’t mind. In fact, she picks a rose from a bush and teases the wind for being jealous of her lips, and she sings, for the whole walk home she sings, because if there is anything her clan can never take back it’s Garrett Hawke.

\--

Fenris is back but he’s acting in ways nobody has ever seen before, and it’s midnight when Merrill accidentally finds him sucking droplets from an empty bottle in an alley not far from Hawke’s home.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she informs him, sad, and reaches for his arm.

When Merrill first met Fenris, she watched him turn blue and sink his nails through the binding of a grown man’s ribcage. She was scared then, and she’s scared now, stumbling back as light ripples waterlike across the surrounding bricks, and she screams when Fenris pins her against the wall because she’s always thought that his skin would burn.

But it doesn’t. The only thing that burns is his glare, how dangerous and not-green it is, and he tightens his grip on her shoulders as he growls, “you have no business here, with him.”

“Alright. Alright, Fenris--”

Fenris swallows, pressing her harder into the wall. “Am I clear?”

His teeth look like they belong in a wild animal and the air between them smells like brandy--the same kind Hawke drinks, the _same kind_ , it freezes every muscle in Merrill’s body but the ones she’s using to beg, “venavis, Fenris, please--”

He lets go when Hawke and Varric appear with the wind at the mouth of the alley way, and for a moment Merrill swears she sees a glint of defeat in his gaze.

_Thank you, Hawke,_ she wants to say, but Hawke looks violent and his eyes are angry, so she follows Varric out of Hightown, says it to him instead.

\--

Hawke’s getting thin and Leandra dies on the day Merrill decides to cook him a minced meat pie. It is startling news that reaches her before Isabela has the chance to properly knock down her door.

She crosses her house with a knife in her hands because it’s too dark to see through the windows, but even before she reaches the welcome area she hears, “she’s dead,” and _knock, knock, knock_ , and, “Merrill, open up, Hawke just watched her die.”

Isabela sits at the round wooden table with her head pressed against her palm while Merrill bolts for the door. Her mouth keeps dropping like she’s about to protest so Merrill waits and waits and waits, but she doesn’t, she just says “I’ll meet you at the bar,” and pinches the bridge of her nose.

Sandal’s crying when he greets her. He points to the dog curled up in front of Leandra’s bedroom, then he points to the ceiling, sobs so loud that Bodahn rushes in to console him.

Heart heavy in her throat, Merrill leaves the dwarves in the living room to slowly ascend the stairs. She can hear the fire crackling in Hawke’s bedroom and wonders, vaguely, if he likes to sleep with it lit or watch his own shadow flicker across the walls.

But then she gets to the door, and in the dark she sees Fenris on his knees and Hawke’s face buried deep in his lap.

She sees the pause in Fenris’s breathing. She sees the wounded, helpless gaze through with he counts the shivers in Hawke’s spine. She sees how slowly he peels off his gauntlets to touch him, hesitation unfurling like a weathered white flag.

And then she sees Fenris break when his arms turn from cautious to protective, and he doubles forward to hide his eyes against the back of Hawke’s head, melting the way snow melts, candles --

Merrill hears a shudder that sounds too close to “thank you” and she backs away, eyes wide, hands cold and clasped to her mouth.


End file.
